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" One of the things that science fiction gets to do is thought experiments about the human condition that would be impractical or unethical to conduct in real life. "

Robert J. Sawyer

Thought

Real

Life

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" The general public still thinks that science fiction has nothing to do with their day-to-day lives. "

" Our job is not to predict the future. Rather, it's to suggest all the possible futures - so that society can make informed decisions about where we want to go. "

" I think most people are indifferent in their evaluation of what is good or bad. "

" By serializing two novels in 'Analog,' the world's No. 1, best-selling science fiction magazine, I've had 200,000 words of fiction and three cover stories in that magazine. Quite an enviable record. "

" In addition to psychopaths, 'Quantum Night' is also a novel about literally thoughtless people, without inner voices, thoughts in their heads. "

" Science fiction is about things that plausibly might happen. Grounding my work in the real world helps make that clear. "

" An agnostic is someone who believes the nature of the Divine is unknowable... and in that sense, I'm willing to subscribe to being an agnostic. "

" I think there's always been, to some degree, a misunderstanding about what science fiction is all about, in that it has been judged by the general public as being literature of prediction, and it isn't. "

" It's possible that there is a guiding intelligence in our universe. I don't see a lot of personal evidence for an interventionist-on-an-individual-basis-deity. I have friends who very much do believe in that. But I don't. "

" Science fiction has never been about the future; it's always been about the present day whether it's Victorian England that Wells was writing about or the post-9/11 era that I'm writing about. "

" My personal mission statement is to combine the intimately human and the grandly cosmic. I like to think that science fiction works on these two different scales. "

" I am very pro-science. "

Robert J. Sawyer

I Am

Very

" A short story is one idea; a novel is a whole soup of them. "

" In the best atheist sense of the word, I feel blessed. "

" I really strived to give equal weight to the two halves of my genre's name: science and fiction. "

" I'm a rationalist. And I can see no evidence for a benevolent and interventionist creator. "

" The single best thing about Mars is the reduced gravity. It's 38 percent of Earth's gravity - about one third. Almost never have you seen that portrayed in film or television. Mars is just portrayed as a place that's got reddish sand but is otherwise pretty much identical to the Mojave Desert, and that's not the case. "

" I'm often characterized as an optimistic writer, and certainly my 'Neanderthal Parallax' and 'WWW' trilogies shade toward the utopian. I like to think that's not simple naivete, but rather a reasonable approach. "

" When I started publishing - my first novel came out in 1990 - there were no options for publishing science fiction in Canada. There were no small presses, and the large presses simply would not touch it at all. "

" If you look at the United States, most of the country is pretty much uninhabited. "

" People are looking for a simplicity in their fictional worlds where good and evil are clearly delineated, that you can't find in the real world, and that provides an enormous comfort - and that, I think, has an awful lot to do with the reason fantasy is so popular. "

" I frankly couldn't imagine being a series mystery-fiction writer, churning out book after book about the same viewpoint character. "

" The traditional route to success in science fiction is by making a name for yourself in short fiction, so people who read science fiction magazines will recognize your byline on a novel. "

" Bradbury was the one guy who was published in places like the 'Saturday Evening Post.' He was the guy who brought science fiction to the masses. If he hadn't existed, science fiction would have been a well-kept secret in literature instead of a widely consumed phenomenon. "

" Social progress is a big thing for me. Although science fiction is traditionally concerned with the hard sciences, which is chemistry, physics, and, some might argue, biology, my father was and still is a social scientist at the University of Toronto. "

" I'm a very skeptical guy: my willing suspension of disbelief doesn't go very far when I'm reading other people's SF, and it goes even less far when I'm writing my own. "

" Science fiction has always been a means for political comment. H.G. Wells' 'The War of the Worlds' wasn't about a Martian invasion - it was a critique of British colonialism, and... 'The Time Machine' is really an indictment of the British class system. "

" Print science fiction writers often do consulting for government bodies. "

" Science fiction is the WikiLeaks of science, getting word to the public about what cutting-edge research really means. "

" The only shows that Americans watch in big numbers are shows about lawyers, doctors, or cops... People don't tune in to watch scientists unless they are forensic scientists. "